Saw IV Too Much for Comic-Con

Coming after Clive Barker and the panel for Midnight Meat Train might have been a tough act to follow, but director Darren Lynn Bousman and producer Mark Burg were up for it, having their first Lionsgate presentation in Hall H at Comic-Con International after years of doing the smaller rooms at the San Diego Convention Center. Their first announcement was that the MPAA had just given their first cut of Saw IV an NC-17 rating, and they would have to figure out what to do to, either to get it down to an R rating or decide whether to release it with that rating. They also had some problems with their planned Comic-Con clip, as they originally wanted to show the first five minutes of the movie but it was turned down, because it was “just too much” so they had to go with something else.

After a montage of clips from the first three “Saw” flicks, the crowd was treated to the famous line “Do you wanna play a game?” from Tobin Bell, who came out to join them and field a few questions from the audience.

Finally, they got to the clip, which similar to past years, featured one of the many deathtraps from the movie. It opened on an older bald man waking up on the floor of a room with a locked collar attached to a chain around his neck. He starts freaking out when he realizes that his eyes have been sewn shut and he can’t see. He starts pulling on the chain to try to release himself and the camera follows the chain to another side where there’s another guy (played by Justin Louis) and he has his mouth sewn shut. So the premise is that one guy can’t see what’s going on, and the other one can see but can’t say anything. In between the two of them is a machine with gears that starts yanking on their chains pulling them closer to it and tightening the collar around their necks, and both of them start panicking. The blind man finds weapons (an axe and a sharp hook-like device) and he starts throwing them although he doesn’t know what is pulling on him. The guys pull back and forth on the chain each one getting closer to the machine, though the lack of communication makes it impossible for them to work together on solving the puzzle. The younger guy spots a key on the back of the other man’s neck and realizing that it might open the locked collar around his neck, he starts making his way over. The two men start fighting and the blinded man swings wildly with the hook and catches the mute man in the leg, blood starts spurting, and then the guy pulls the hook out of his leg and starts hacking the blind man with the axe over and over (or it might have been the hook–honestly, there was so much back and forth as they fought that it was hard to keep track). Finally, the mute man gets the key off the neck of his felled opponent and fumbles to try to open the lock on his neck but the chain pulls him closer to the machine and blood starts pouring out of his mouth because he’s run out of time.